In the summer of 1867, the American photographer Carleton
Watkins hauled a mammoth wooden camera through the
wilderness of Oregon, taking pictures of the mountains.
To prepare each negative, he poured noxious chemicals
onto a glass plate the size of a windowpane and exposed
it while still wet, developing it on the spot. Even then, his
work was not complete. Because wet-plate emulsions
are disproportionately sensitive to blue light, his skies
were overexposed, utterly devoid of clouds. Back in his
San Francisco studio, Watkins manipulated his photos to
resemble the landscapes he’d witnessed. His finished prints
were composites, completed with a separate set of cloudfilled negatives.

While his intervention made the mountain vistas more
meteorologically accurate, she intentionally introduced
physical impossibilities, from conflicting perspectives to
rearranged geology, much as a painter might fictionalize a
landscape. Yet in another sense, each photographer was
artfully striving for truth about how we experience the
world, laboring against the inadequacies of the camera. For
Watkins, the constraints were physical. For Dorfman, they’re
psychological, a discrepancy between photomechanical
depiction and how the brain records what the eyes perceive.
A keen observer of the world and her own perceptions, she
understands that her pictures can be made to seem more
psychologically real by making them less literally realistic.

Nearly a century and a half later, Elena Dorfman – another
American photographer porting a large-format camera –
spent several summers in the rock quarries of Kentucky
and Indiana, landscapes as dramatic as Watkins’s Oregon.
Dorfman had none of the old limitations. Her digital
Hasselblad instantaneously captured 32-megapixel photos
in full color. But it didn’t satisfy her. In postproduction she
created composites on her computer, layering as many as
300 images to obtain effects unlike anything seen in nature.

Empire Falling, which Dorfman completed in 2012, stitched
together conflicting perspectives much as the brain enlists
saccadic eye movements to construct a single unified vista
rich in visual information. In her most ambitious pictures,
Dorfman took this power of synthesis to an extreme by
transparently layering scenes viewed from completely
different directions or up close and at a distance. In a single
two-dimensional image, Dorfman presented the visual
information we’d glean by exploring a three-dimensional
landscape over many hours or days. If you look at one of
her pictures for long enough, you might start to believe
you’d actually experienced the place.

In one sense, Dorfman was doing the opposite of
what Watkins achieved with his library of clouds.

3

But Dorfman was seeking something deeper than an optical
illusion – or pictorial travelogue – in her photographs of
quarries. “Manipulating and reconstructing the landscape,
I reassemble and layer the images emulating the natural
process of stratum on stratum,” she wrote in her artist’s
statement. In other words, she was photographing the
layering of time. Dorfman’s new body of work, Sublime,
significantly expands on this concept by photographically
exploring the rippled layers of history and memory along
the fifty-two miles of the Los Angeles River.
The LA River is an ideal subject for Dorfman’s
psychotemporal artistic investigation. Ever since 1825 –
when a flood defined the river’s current course – people
have repeatedly forgotten about it only to be forcefully
reminded. Los Angeles flooded more than ten times before
1900, repeatedly destroying homes and farms built along
the floodplain. Major floods in 1914 and 1916 were even
more catastrophic, causing millions of dollars in damage.
Angelinos passed bonds to build levees, but forgetfulness
and complacency returned before meaningful changes
could be made. More housing was built instead, including
two hundred homes destroyed in a 1934 flood that killed
forty-nine people. That made an impression on city planners.
Applying for New Deal funding and assistance from the
Army Corps of Engineers, Los Angeles finally confronted the
unruly waterway – by sentencing it to oblivion.
Nearly two hundred million gallons of concrete were poured
into the river over a period of two decades, confining all
but a few short stretches to a flat-walled cement channel.
Declared non-navigable, the denatured waterway was
fenced off as a drainage ditch, a fate reinforced in the
1980s when the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant
began pouring in millions of gallons of treated wastewater
every day. With the exception of an occasional movie shoot
– such as a high-speed chase scene in Terminator 2 – the LA
River essentially vanished, ignored by all but the homeless
who camped there and kids who tagged it with spraypaint.
This is the river that Dorfman started to explore in 2013.
Notably, she was not alone. Over the past several years, the
river has been rediscovered (or remembered) by a growing
number of Angelinos in search of recreational space or a
natural refuge within their ever-more-hectic metropolis. Parts
of the river are now zoned for kayaking. There’s discussion
about removing cement so that wildlife can thrive. In this
period of uncertainty about the river’s future, Dorfman’s
photography encompasses and compresses all the many
strata of the river’s history by layering traces of nature and
development and decay.

4

Some layers date from long before she was born. In her
research, Dorfman uncovered wet plates shot by amateur
photographers in the 1800s. She scanned these pictures
and sometimes retraced where they were originally shot. To
her archive of vintage images, she added approximately
twenty thousand of her own, produced over a two-year
period of walking every foot of the river with her camera.
She then worked by hand, turning proof-sheet prints into
paper cutouts that she layered and shifted to compose each
of the ten works in the Sublime series. Guided by these
paper templates, she created the final composite images in
Adobe Photoshop, meticulously blending them to ensure
invisible transitions.
A typical artwork can incorporate as many as one hundred
and fifty images. Some of these might be used to define
the geography, others to alter it, and a few might be
completely recontextualized in the service of pure invention.
For example, in Sublime: The LA River 8, Dorfman tracked
down the spot in Griffith Park where an anonymous
photographer set his tripod in the mid-1800s. She made
her own photographs there and in the surrounding area,
layering these transparently as if to let us see through the
intervening century. Looking more carefully, we notice
more surreal details, such as the unnatural coloring of the
mountains, which Dorfman achieved by overlaying images
of lurid chemical runoff found elsewhere on the river.
The unreliable perspective and disconcerting coloration give
the image the quality of a memory, at once less trustworthy
and more truthful than a straightforward photograph.
Memories are episodic, equivalent to the saccadic act of
seeing. They’re constructed images that recompose pertinent
details about a specific time and place in relation to a
lifetime of knowledge and experience. We may have been
someplace often and may know about its deeper past from
archival albums or Wikipedia. Any of this can become part
of our mental image, as can myriad other facts. The lurid
coloration of the mountains, for instance, may be a way of
marking what we understand about the Anthropocene, in
which the human impact on nature is ubiquitous. Through
Dorfman’s photographs, we vicariously recollect what she
has seen and learned. Her memories become our own. Her
works are uncanny.
Yet they are also unquestionably sublime. They advance a
visual tradition dating back to eighteenth century England,
an aesthetic that Edmund Burke originally defined as
massive, gloomy and rugged. This sublime vision was first
introduced to American landscape painting by Thomas Cole

on the Hudson River in 1825 (coincidentally the same year
that the LA River took its present course). Cole’s work – and
the work made by other members of the Hudson River
School – have directly influenced Dorfman, who studied
their paintings carefully while working on her river series.
Their work pervades her color palette and the ambiance of
her photographs, a mood that is simultaneously magnificent
and foreboding. In one notable case – Sublime: The LA
River 1 – she even responds directly to one of Cole’s
paintings.
The painting is The Savage State from Cole’s epic sequence
The Course of Empire, which traces the rise and fall of a
great ancient civilization, evoking a cycle of growth and
ruin that could equally apply to present-day Los Angeles. In
this series, Cole aspired to what he called a “higher style of
landscape”, arguing that a serious artist’s work “ought not
to be a dead imitation of things” because it should possess
“the power to impress a sentiment, or enforce a truth.” He
approached this ideal by constructing fictitious scenes
imbued with visual qualities that psychologically primed the
viewer to adopt his philosophical perspective.
In Sublime: The LA River 1, Dorfman likewise impresses
sentiments and enforces truths. All of her Sublime
photographs do, carrying forward Cole’s cyclical theme
in time and technique. The photographs prime the viewer
to confront “the ebb and flow between civilization and
savagery, the cycle of social and cultural development,
and the descent into ruin and back again” (as Dorfman
phrases the philosophical premise of her series in her artist’s
statement). But the medium of photography allows her to
impress sentiments and enforce truths in ways that are less
dogmatic that was typical of Cole, to give them a tinge of
evidence, an essential difference already evident to one
of the first photographers working under Cole’s aesthetic
influence: Carleton Watkins, whose sublime vision of the
American West convinced Congress to preserve swathes of
wilderness.
While no thoughtful modern viewer would consider
photography objective, photographs do record data
as collected and recollected by the photographer. Like
memories, they subsist between fact and fantasy. The
ebb and flow between civilization and savagery depicted
in Cole’s paintings can easily be dismissed as one man’s
delusion. Dorfman’s photographic engagement with the
“higher style of landscape” seeps deeper into the space
where our own beliefs are created.

5

Sublime: The L.A. River 1
36 1/2” X 52”

Details pp. 8-9

6

7

Sublime: The L.A. River 2
38 1/4” X 52”

Details pp. 12-13

10

11

12

13

Sublime: The L.A. River 3
52” X 38”

Details pp. 16-19

14

16

Sublime: The L.A. River 4
35 1/2” X 52”

Detail pp. 22-23

20

21

Sublime: The L.A. River 5
36 1/2” X 52”
Detail p. 27

24

Sublime: The L.A. River 7
52” X 39”

Details pp. 30-31

28

31

Sublime: The L.A. River 8
34 1/2” X 52”
Detail p. 35

32

33

Sublime: The L.A. River 9
54” X 72”

Details pp. 38-39

36

37

39

Sublime: The L.A. River 10
33” X 70”

Details pp. 42-45

40

41

42

44

45

The photographs from the series, Sublime: The L.A. River,
chronicle the Los Angeles River, an urban waterway that
runs through the Western metropolis. The impetus behind
these images was not to document the current state of the
51-mile river that was once the lifeblood of the early settlers
and is now encased in concrete. In this body of work, the
river is presented as metaphor, highlighting the ebb and
flow between civilization and savagery, the cycle of social
and cultural development, and the descent into ruin and
back again.
The multilayered photographs were constructed by means of
intentional aesthetic decisions involving the combination of
dozensâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and sometimes hundredsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;of individual details. The
landscapes highlight the fraught relationship between the
natural and the man-made. A bucolic wildlife scene that
is reminiscent of 18th century landscape painting is littered
with garbage and personal belongings. Hungry coyotes
roam the concrete riverbed, sniffing at elaborate homeless
encampments. Blue herons quietly stalk nourishment in the
shallow waters next to a shoot for a car commercial.

The river, both disquieting and sublime, was my companion
over the course of two years. These photographs, comprised
of both original and historic imagery, are inspired by a very
real place that is ultimately revealed as unreal, perhaps even
surreal.
Empire Falling, my previous series of reconstructed
landscapes made in the American Midwest, marked
my departure from portraiture that explored the cultural,
social, and sexual practices of marginalized communities.
Published works from selected exhibitions include The
Pleasure Park, photographic stills and 3-channel video,
2009; Fandomania (Aperture, 2007); and Still Lovers
(Channel, 2005)
Elena Dorfman, Los Angeles, 2015